Hi Stef,
Installing moose was simple and I thoroughly enjoyed the demo of the moose book regarding ArgoUML (even if it was an older version of FAMIX). This got me totally hooked :-) Using Pharo as a language was easy with the
ProfSef go. http://stackoverflow.com/a/14414221/1168342
But the "IDE" notion of the environment was/is not so intuitive. One big block was the process of creating classes/methods because I'm conditioned to seek a "new class" menu (à la Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc.) that simply does not exist in Pharo. It strangely exists for packages, which added to the confusion I think.
My personal experience ahead: For the longest time, I was just banging on experimental code in a playground (even finding the playground took me some time) -- I was savagely saving my images until I finally lost some work because the image got too big (didn't lose much work, but I realized my working method was not sustainable and I decided to hunker down with a tutorial). 4 months ago (or so) I totally got along with R's environment (with no experience at all) from nothing but using Google. I've embraced plenty of techs in the same lightweight way, MikTeX, LyX, JavaScript, Git, etc. I guess I felt like it is hard to "teach this old dog the new Pharo trick", despite these other successes. The language is beautiful and simple.
The tutorial I finally went (suffered?) through to create classes/methods was for an older version of Pharo environment. It didn't look like Pharo on my Windows 10 and I had to open my mind a lot more (than I'm used to) to finally bridge the gap. Still not comfortable with coding this way. I like to do versioning of code (this old dog started in MPW on a Mac, used CVS, SVN and now Git). For now, I'm probably not sure if I need it in Pharo/Moose.
Going to try to get some students working on this soon.
Cheers,
C. Fuhrman